


Theories of Advanced Human Recalibration

by Allyjayrunaway



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: AKA Jeff confronts his feelings in front of someone who has enough licensing to deal with it, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, It might even go well for him, Jeff is in therapy, Teeny bit of angst, mostly pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25480255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allyjayrunaway/pseuds/Allyjayrunaway
Summary: Jeff doesn’t do this. He doesn’t sit in hokey waiting rooms on beanbag chairs that give no lumbar support, smelling incense and patchouli and an undercurrent of curry. He doesn’t watch the time, willing the seconds hand to just tick faster. He doesn’t sit in total abject terror as the door opens and the woman beckons him to come in. He doesn’t. Except, here he is, doing it.
Relationships: Annie Edison/Jeff Winger, Jeff Winger & the Study Group
Comments: 8
Kudos: 61





	Theories of Advanced Human Recalibration

**Author's Note:**

> We’re in for the long haul, y’all. Buckle in.  
> Thanks to the members of the Community Discord chat, particularly Childish Glover and JeffWing for their honest thoughts on Pierce, and thanks to everyone else for ruining my sleep schedule.

Jeff doesn’t do this. He doesn’t sit in hokey waiting rooms on beanbag chairs that give no lumbar support, smelling incense and patchouli and an undercurrent of curry. He doesn’t watch the time, willing the seconds hand to just tick faster. He doesn’t sit in total abject terror as the door opens and the woman beckons him to come in. He doesn’t. Except, here he is, doing it. 

He’s taking a step forward, through the doorway and into the little room with its strong aroma and brightly coloured tapestries, and he’s sitting down on the little couch, looking at everything but her. Truth be told, he’s expecting to deal with the usual Greendale garbage for forty-five minutes before writing it all off in his mind, convincing himself he was right all along and this is a waste of time. However, somewhere between her staccato introduction and an explanation of their current location, he’s realising that she might not be bogus and that she definitely means business. He momentarily forgets to be terrified. 

“...and it was just a whole mess, what with the possums and the accident that set them off, so in short, I’m taking my appointments here while my office is being renovated. It’s not exactly my style, but it’ll have to do.” She finishes saying, just before he realises he missed her name and will embarrassingly have to ask her again. 

“Sheryl.” She says, part of an obvious habit of getting right to the point. “This profession requires a bit of familiarity. You call me Sheryl, I’ll call you Jeff, and hopefully we’ll get along.” He respects that. 

“Well,” he begins, rather shakily, “I haven’t really done this much before, so I’m not really sure where to start.” She nods knowingly. 

“Yes, that much was obvious. I’m going to go ahead and assume that you either need help wading through the emotions in regards to your rocky relationship with your father, or that you don’t know how properly care for the people in your life that you really love.” 

“Actually, no...” He begins before what she’s said fully sinks in. “Yes? Maybe? I’m not entirely sure. About the latter, by the way; I’ve already dealt with my father.” 

“You have?” Sheryl sounds genuinely surprised. He finds himself chuckling. 

“I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at his house a couple of years ago with a friend of mine- I say that like she didn’t force me to go- and I realised that he wasn’t a shitty dad because of anything I did, he was just a shitty person whom I happen to share DNA with. Just because I don’t want to be like him doesn’t mean I can’t be like me... and I think that’s the first time I’ve ever said any of that out loud.” He shifts uncomfortably, the pit reforming in his stomach. The urge to take out his phone and pretend that none of this is happening is nearly overwhelming. He doesn’t though, because somehow in the five minutes since he’s met her, Sheryl has earned his respect. Plus, he’s paying her a lot of money and it feels wrong to waste his own resources like that. 

“Could you come in and tell some of my other clients that? Really, I’d appreciate it.” She favours him with a wry grin, which he returns. “That’s a really good step to dealing with those feelings, but it’s always a process. Since I may have been either wrong or right in my assumptions about what brings you to my fine couch, why don’t you tell me? Why are you here, Jeff?” 

He takes a deep breath. This is what he’s been scared of. Trying to explain everything, the ridiculousness of Greendale and the depth of the feelings he has surrounding the whole situation. It feels impossible. Another deep breath.

“Okay, here goes. Eight years ago, I was a lawyer. I got disbarred because my degree was from an online school in Columbia, and I had to get my bachelor’s if I wanted to be reinstated. So I enrolled in Greendale Community College, where I thought I could just breeze through and get my life back on track. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, I started a study group to try and flirt with this girl from my Spanish class, which failed spectacularly in so many ways, but this study group became my family. We were always there for each other, and we all learned so much from each other, and then I graduated. And became a teacher at Greendale. We went through so much shit just to try to stay together, and at the end it all fell apart. Everyone’s scattered to the four winds, and I’m here, mourning the loss of my family.” He takes a breath, watches Sheryl frantically scribbling notes, then forges on. 

“I was close with all of them, you know? They all played a part, all had a function, but I worked the best with one of them, and now she’s gone and I have to learn to live without her. And that isn’t going so well.” He rubs his hands into the corners of his eyes, frustrated, and notices that Sheryl has ceased the frenetic scribbling and is regarding him seriously. 

“What kind of relationship was this, if you’re okay with sharing?” She says it gently, and he can’t really take gentle right now. He’s been so hard on himself, on everyone, for so long that gentleness feels foreign to him. 

“Ah, okay...I can try?” He supposes that he can, that maybe the first step into fixing whatever is so broken and wrong inside him is to try and define what it is that he can’t let go of. She nods, tells him to go ahead and try, so she can understand what’s causing the tension that ripples through his body. He has a clarification to make, though. “There’s like, client-therapist confidentiality, right? You can’t tell anyone what goes on in these sessions?” 

She laughs, a full belly laugh, and he’s surprised to find himself smiling along with her. It’s as though she’s some sort of emotional mirror; she’s serious and he finds himself taking things seriously, she laughs and he wants to laugh along with her. 

“Yes, everything in these sessions will remain totally confidential, unless you give me a reason to believe that you might harm someone else or yourself, in which case, I am required to report that to the proper authorities. So unless you think that whatever you’ve got to tell me is going to cause any concern of that variety, go ahead. I’m listening.” 

“Okay...well, her name is Annie. We met when she was eighteen-“ He pauses when she visibly frowns, and realises that he might not sound totally above board here. “Okay, I realise that sounds bad, I’m just trying to give you the full picture.” She nods, jots something down. He feels like he’s losing her, so he rushes to try and make things seem kosher. “She was fresh out of high school, back from rehab, and as tightly strung as humanly possible. And after all of forty-eight hours, I wanted so badly to protect her. She was so smart, so driven, so...everything that I wasn’t, and I never wanted her to burn out the way I did. So we had this bond, we made a great team, mostly because I would do anything she asked me and she was, well, Annie. That’s how things went on for a few years, trying to make sure that she would be okay, because everyone else was such a flaming hot mess already. I thought, if I can just make sure that she gets out of here intact, then she’d go on to become the next President or Supreme Court judge or whatever she decided to be.“ He doesn’t want to think about this, but if he’s honest, it’s all he can think about, and somewhere along the line he’s gotten to the point where he just needs to get it out. 

“And yes, I’d be lying if I said we didn’t have our childish moments, but somewhere along the way, she grew up, and I stayed the same. We were friends for six years, more than friends really, and all of a sudden she’s leaving for an internship with the FBI, and I’m certain I’m never going to hear from her again. Which wasn’t strictly true, but now it’s a monthly email addressed to all of our friends, and that person who constantly challenged me to be better is gone, and I can feel myself slipping back into that place where I’m just the worst version of me.” He stops talking, afraid of the lump in his throat and the catch in his voice; he wonders if he can afford to tell the truth to the first person he’s met in ages who might actually understand it. He might as well go all in. 

He meets Sheryl’s eyes, and continues, “I can hear her in the back of my mind telling me to be better, but it seems impossible. I don’t have anyone or anything to change for.” She eyes him for a minute, maybe taking it all in, processing this dump of information, or maybe gauging whether or not he’s in a state to hear what she has to say. He doesn’t know until she speaks.

“This is what we in the therapy world call ‘a simple fix’. Do you know why?” He looks a little shocked despite attempting to school his features into an unreadable mask. He thought maybe the depth of the issues would be obvious to her, but maybe not. 

“I can’t say I do.”

“You obviously have someone to do it for. Do it for her. Just because she isn’t here to rub your perceived inadequacies in your face doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means it won’t necessarily be a trial by fire. I am curious about this relationship, in terms of how the two of you worked together as opposed to just how you feel about it, but that’ll have to be for Tuesday. ” He nods, then looks at the clock, realising that their hour is just about up. He must’ve spent more time thinking about things than he thought. “In the meantime,” Sheryl continues, still scribbling on her notepad, “I’d like you to spend some time thinking about the members of this study group so you can tell me about them and what their ‘roles’ were, as you said. That way I can get a more complete picture in terms of what we’re working with. Otherwise, I’ll say that I think you’ve done very well in allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and I’d like you to try and continue that through the week.” 

He leaves, still in a daze as thoughts of Annie and shenanigans and too-late, half-baked confessions float around in his head. It’s not until he’s back at his apartment, nursing a scotch that he realises he’s made a second appointment. That hasn’t happened in years. 

————————

Tuesday rolls around and he feels about as unprepared as he ever has. He seems to have made some kind of impression, though, because Sheryl had emailed him the day before suggesting they up their schedule to twice a week. He doesn’t know if that’s a concerning sign or not, but he’s really trying not to think about it. He’s done therapy before, but he’s never been at the point of truly accepting it before. Those experiences were all spectacular failures, and he’d curtailed any self-loathing by telling himself that it was bound to fail. Any major that would accept Britta was a cursed industry, obviously. 

However, after his experiences over the last several years and finally coming to terms with exactly how batshit his experience at Greendale had actually been, he had managed to open himself to the idea almost on accident. Searching for a good therapist, according to the cursory Google search he’d done, was a tricky process that rarely went perfectly the first time around. So he’d done his due diligence and found the only therapist in the area who had a PhD, and he’d set up the appointment. Then cancelled. Then rescheduled. When he finally showed up for his intake appointment, he was halfway back to convincing himself that only broken people try to fix broken people, but it had gone surprisingly well. 

Now, he’s back in the ridiculous waiting room, counting the seconds by the heartbeat thundering in his ears and trying not to sweat too much. He doesn’t really know why this makes him so nervous, just that the thought of someone asking him to lay himself bare and then poking holes all through his logic makes him want to claw his own skin off. A process he’s clearly about to start, if the sudden grip on his own knees when Sheryl comes to get him is anything to go by. 

Exhaling shakily, he stands, makes his way into the room he never would have bet on seeing a second time, and all but collapses on the couch. Sheryl, for her part, doesn’t seem to be put off by the obvious anxiety Jeff is inadvertently throwing at her. 

“So, Jeff, I hope you’ve had a good week. Is there anything you’d like to talk about before we get to the things we discussed last time?” 

He thinks about telling her that he’s having trouble thinking, that the idea of making himself better to please the ghost of what could have been grates on his very being, that all he wants to do is drown himself in malt scotch and self-pity...but instead he just says, “Nothing really to complain about.” Pause. “No huge revelations either, though.” Sheryl laughs. 

“I think you’ll find after a while that huge revelations are hard to come by and are rarely as accurate as one would hope.” She says this as though it’s a familiar yet arduous song and dance she’s performed a thousand times. Like she’s been on his side of the couch and sweated it out. It makes him wonder about her, something that never would have happened even a year ago. 

The thing about being self-absorbed, he’s learned, is that you often miss the best, most interesting stories because nine times out of ten, they aren’t going to be about you. He kind of hates Slater for giving him real world experience with statistics. 

He misses Annie, she was always the most interesting story he wanted to be told. 

“Okay, well, let’s start with your homework from last week. Can you further explain this group and its members so I can understand what we’re dealing with here?” Sheryl has her pen poised, ready to reduce his entire world to a series of scribbles. He sighs, taking another deep breath to try and calm the thoughts swirling in his mind, to try to get a handle on something real and concrete that he can use to explain the madness and love. 

“Okay, something we have to establish is that Greendale, where I went to school and now currently teach, is an insane place full of insane people where insane things happen. Nothing that goes on there comes anywhere close to the realm of normal. My study group somehow ended up in the middle of the crazy each and every time, and things always got...complicated.” He finishes with a sigh, waiting for her response. He thinks it’ll probably be a while before she actually understands the true extent of the nonsense, but hopefully she’ll at least hear him out. 

“Okay, when you say insane people and insane events, can you give me some examples?” He chuckles darkly, casting his mind back over the years. 

“Well, there was a school wide paintball battle to death over priority scheduling, a second paintball battle to the death over a prize of a hundred thousand dollars that ended up being orchestrated by our rival school City College; there was time the Glee Club coach admitted to cutting his own break lines to kill the previous glee club because they weren’t good enough to win; Subway, the sandwich retailers tried to buy the school but we managed to save the school at the literal last second-“ He looks up to see a very confused and somewhat horrified look on her face and figures that’s enough evidence for now. 

“Now that you mention it, I do seem to remember a news report about damage to school property and looting at some point...”She pauses, regains her composure a bit. “So what I’m hearing is that there was a lot of instability during those six years and that drew you all much closer as a group?” 

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. But it was more than that, too, you know? We all had our own relationships, all had our own things, nobody was left out. Except occasionally Pierce, but that was in service of the greater good.” 

“Well, aside from Annie, Pierce is the first name I’ve gotten out of you, so let’s start with that.” Jeff groans. 

“Pierce was...a racist, homophobic, sexually uncomfortable piece of work who made us realise that life is short and occasionally dropped just enough wisdom to make him worthwhile to have around.” 

“Was?” He senses she wants him to open up about Pierce’s death, so he does. It’s not that he didn’t care about Pierce, it’s just that he made it so damn hard. 

“According to the discussion right before we a group polygraph to see if we qualified for his bequeathments, he apparently died from dehydration em-“He coughs uncomfortably. “-Creating said bequeathments.” 

When Sheryl only looks at him with a blank face, he cringes internally. “Look, the official story is that he died from dehydration after he left a vial of his sperm to each of us. Not that I believe that entirely, but we did all receive the-um-gifts. Honestly, that’s Pierce in a nutshell: he left me his sperm and a bottle of Macallan 40, and he was the father figure I never, ever wanted but sometimes appreciated.” Sheryl somehow, miraculously, seems to believe him. It’s the truth of course, but he hasn’t met many people beyond the dark clutches of Greendale who will believe it. 

“Oookay, well, that’s certainly a start. What about the person you met first? Who was the first person in this group that you talked with?” 

In his mind, he sees a slender kid with curiously knowing eyes and an unfathomable ability to see right through people but not understand them. 

“Abed. I met Abed first. He was like this wealth of information that I thought I needed at the time, but would ultimately turn out to be useless. And if I really think about it, he might’ve been the best non-romantic friend I’ve ever had.” It’s a revelation for Jeff, not huge, not life changing, but it’s something. He wonders how he always manages to let himself get in the way of the most important things in life. 

“Honestly, we all do. That’s what I’m here for. To help you recognise when you’re getting in your own way. What you have to do is decide whether or not you want to.” It’s not until she’s finished that he realises he’d wondered aloud, but that doesn’t make her any less right. What if he doesn’t want that? What if he does? He doesn’t know which option is scarier in the long run, but he makes himself promise he’ll stick around to find out.


End file.
